Debian bugs and Ubuntu

[Bjorn Tillenius]

On Wed, Oct 18, 2006 at 01:18:25AM -0700, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 18, 2006 at 04:09:22PM +1300, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> > On Oct 17, 2006, at 12:27 AM, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> > > Let me explain; this isn't really about linking.
> > >
> > > Because Ubuntu and Debian have so much common code, it turns out that 
> > > we share a large proportion of our bugs as well.  Therefore, for a 
> > > given Debian bug, it's rather likely that it is also present in Ubuntu 
> > > and therefore relevant to us.
> > >
> > > When we used Bugzilla, we took advantage of this by importing all 
> > > Debian bugs of a certain minimum severity into Bugzilla so that we 
> > > could track their status in Ubuntu.  Since moving our bug tracking to 
> > > Launchpad, we've lost this useful resource.
> > > ...
> > 
> > I was aware that Ubuntu and Debian share code and bugs.
> > 
> > To get back to my question, then: Should Launchpad know about a greater 
> > proportion of the Debian bugs? If so, how can we make it easier to link 
> > an Ubuntu bug to a Debian one? Are you suggesting that we import Debian 
> > bugs into Launchpad, as we used to into Bugzilla? Or is the 
> > fixed-in-Debian mailing list a more efficient solution?
> 
> Yes, I think that Launchpad should know about a greater proportion of Debian
> bugs.
> 
> Yes, I think it should be easier to link an Ubuntu bug to a Debian one.
> Specifically, I think that the form for adding a new distro task default to
> Ubuntu rather than Baltix, since a huge proportion of the current activity
> in Launchpad relates to Ubuntu, and many bugs seem to have Baltix tasks
> inadvertently added.  This would make it a two-click operation to mark a
> Debian bug as affecting Ubuntu.  However, I proposed this simple change some
> time ago, and I got no traction with the Launchpad team.
> 
> It's less clear whether we should import the bugs, or just link to them.
> Imported bugs are much faster to process because the details are presented
> immediately and an immediate decision can often be made about whether the
> bug applies to Ubuntu.  Mark has not been very receptive to the idea of
> importing in the past.

There has been quite a lot of discussion about importing Debian in the
past, and Mark even wrote code for doing this. It was decided that it
was better to wait, though, until we could resolve all the outstanding
issues. I think the most outstanding were:

    * How do we make it clear that Debian doesn't use Launchpad?

      At the moment, if you look at a bug listing for a project that
      uses Malone, and for a project that doesn't, there isn't really
      any difference.

    * How do we make it clear that many of those who added comments
      to Debian bugs, didn't do so via Launchpad, and they won't get
      notified if new comments get added?

      When importing Debian bugs, the plan was to import comments as
      well. There wasn't a plan how to distinguish imported comments
      from comments added via Launchpad directly, though. This would
      make it appear like all the comments were added via Launchpad,
      and there would be two separate discussions going on; one in
      Launchpad, and one in debbugs.

I'm confident that these issues can be resolved, but it might take some
time to get it done. It might be good to discuss this at UDS, to come
up with a plan for improving this issue. For example, a first step could
be doing a simple import (without any comments), with a link added to
the Debian bug, and then the full import would be done at a later stage.


Regards,

Bjorn